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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26001526">gonna have to drag me, kicking and screaming</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hueyhuey/pseuds/Hueyhuey'>Hueyhuey</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Spider-Man - All Media Types, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>'cause of spider-man, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Arachnophobia, Body Horror, Doc Ock's such an ass, Fear of Heights, Gen, Hospitals, May Parker (mentioned) - Freeform, Miles Morales Needs a Hug, Peter Parker Needs a Hug, a lil bit, because there's always room for sadness about ben, idk it's just. not any of the multiverse spideys and it's not 616 so idk what to call it, kind of?, love to hate him, minor references to surgery, sadness about Ben Parker, sticky hands</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-08-20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-02-02</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 03:40:11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Not Rated</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>6,498</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26001526</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hueyhuey/pseuds/Hueyhuey</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Peter’d started fighting the good fight before his first puberty-induced growth spurt had even hit.</p>
<p>He’d been a baby.</p>
<p>Just a wee one. It hadn’t been fair, really.</p>
<p>(Peter got bit by a spider. His life, to put it delicately, went a bit to shit. He reflects on this when he encounters someone in a similar position.)</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Ben Parker &amp; May Parker (Spider-Man) &amp; Peter Parker, Ben Parker &amp; Peter Parker, Miles Morales &amp; Peter Parker</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>9</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>63</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. garden of eden</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>I am once again asking for you to accept these Peber Thoughts</p>
<p>No but fr i've been prodding around with the spiderverse and the idea of a multiverse and also i want to work with a harder-edged peter than mr squeaky-clean mcu so. here we are. this peter isn't any of the peters from spiderverse and this miles isn't that miles either. i'm workin on figuring out exactly what they are and where they stand lol. heed the tags and, as always, be safe!</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p><em>We’re every age at once and tucked inside ourselves like Russian nesting dolls - Tiny Glowing Screens, Part 2; Watsky.</em>
</p>
<p><br/>
<br/>
</p>
<p>Peter’d started fighting the good fight before his first puberty-induced growth spurt had even hit.</p>
<p>He’d been a baby.</p>
<p>Just a wee one. It hadn’t been fair, really.</p>
<p>Not to his aunt or uncle. Not to him or the life he’d been figuring out how to balance on shaky, hesitant baby deer legs.</p>
<p>It’d started with adhering to a box of cereal and a comic book in his left and right hands the morning after a field trip.</p>
<p>Had graduated to bigger and more perilous things. Had stuck to walls and doors and ceilings and panicked about it until he ran out of energy and passed out, collapsed to the ground and broke or sprained or bruised something.</p>
<p>Ben found him once, hanging from the motor of the living room ceiling fan by his index and middle fingers. His shoulder had come dislocated from the force of his body weight when he’d wrenched the other fingers free and he’d spent the quarter hour since trying to breathe levelly enough through the pain to allow his remaining fingers to come unstuck.</p>
<p>Ben saw the raw tear tracks scoring his kid’s cheeks and Peter remembered seeing the look on that face and thinking that was the day his uncle started to die.</p>
<p>Incidents like that were not an uncommon occurrence over the next months. Some days, Peter would wake up and head to the kitchen to help out with breakfast and he’d leave a fist-shaped dent in the handle of whatever pan he decided to try his luck with.</p>
<p>Once or twice he ripped the door to their house right off its hinges. There were a few months during which every door knob in the house had to be replaced with relative frequency and regularity. Many a utensil had been snapped, a dish shattered between newly bleeding palms, an appliance destroyed by the closing of a door or the mash of a button. His strength was volatile and the scale along which it operated was sometimes linear, sometimes exponential or maybe logarithmic.</p>
<p>He wore glasses. He needed them. Except sometimes he’d squint his eyes just so or he’d tilt his head a particular way and suddenly he could see the entire world in one. At once. All the big and little and minute things within a mile radius were his to see and process and perceive and have. He saw motes of dust coming to rest along the microscopic ripples in wallpaper; he learned the differences between the grains of the hardwood in the kitchen and in the back bedroom; he saw everything with perfect clarity, with an astigmatic blur, with a spectrum of color to which he’d never previously had access and which he could never attempt to describe. These all at once and much more which his head couldn’t begin to sort.</p>
<p>He saw flowers the way bees did and bees the way songbirds could. </p>
<p>Hawk’s eyes, eightfold. Infrared reflected in ultraviolet. Lens like a housefly: fragmented and spherical. The world was highlighted by incredible and terrible things he knew no one else had ever seen--and maybe no one else ever would. </p>
<p>But this was only sometimes. Usually, he was rather impressively nearsighted. He could read up close okay, but anything farther than a couple feet away was pretty much hopeless without the help of his glasses or contacts.</p>
<p>His shoulders were the worst offenders of the joints in his extremities. They wanted to bend in ways his bones simply didn’t know how to do. His shoulder blades wanted his elbows to pivot, but his useless, pivotless elbows wanted his shoulders closer to his collarbones. His fingers thought they were longer than they were. His left thumb thought his right thumb shouldn’t exist and occasionally sought to assert its dominance in the realm of Thumbs Which Functioned and Also Were Attached to Peter.</p>
<p>Even before he hit the ground running on clumsy feet, bundled up in a searingly blue sweatshirt and red pajama pants, his body had fully endeavored to discover the lengths to which it could traumatize itself. His hips had long come divorced from their proper slots in his pelvic bone. They tended to shift and invert and tug at his poor, too-loose ligaments until he was forced to lie flat on the floor and ride out their wanderlust.</p>
<p>He couldn’t crack his knuckles because the last time he had, he’d accidentally applied too much pressure and had crushed the joint at the base of his middle right finger.</p>
<p>All of the ‘fuck off’ birds flipped from that hand were arthritic now, and lopsided. Like they weren’t sure of themselves.</p>
<p>He was a regular in the ER at the Queens branch of Mount Sinai. The entire staff at the orthopedic specialist facility a couple of blocks over knew him very personally.</p>
<p>Once, a year or so in, they’d put a screw in his elbow after a nasty, twisting break-turned-dislocation instigated by a hand stuck to a pole while trying to get off the subway at the correct stop. He’d awoken after surgery screaming through all the haze of painkillers and antibiotics to tear, rend, gouge the incision open, do everything in his power to get the metal <em>out</em>.</p>
<p>He’d ruined that joint; they couldn’t rebuild it for all the damage. Even whatever boosted healing factor he had couldn’t fix it. His uncle had been there, but powerless to stop it. Powerless because Peter had so much inexplicable raw energy from which to fuel his violence and pain and rage. Powerless because if he’d lain a hand on Peter in that instant, he’d have been shredded along with the elbow.</p>
<p>There’d been a blind terror in the act; a catharsis in the removal of the screw.</p>
<p>He couldn’t have metal in him. Not like that. Not Getting In The Way. He just. No. His body sang his praises in the moment and then, when the metal was out, it’d turned against him.</p>
<p>He was better off with a fucked elbow that didn’t like to straighten and heavy sedation and lots of rehab, physical therapy, shocked experts, chronic, inescapable pain.</p>
<p>They tried to diagnose him. Went through scans and tests and x-ray after x-ray. The latter always tickled, as if the rays were interacting with whatever radioactivity existed in his cells. He’d had to stop himself from giggling on more than one occasion.</p>
<p>Doctors and surgeons and therapists of all manner were stumped. They hadn’t quite pulled out the red string and the cork board and accused him of being enhanced, but it was a close thing. They tried EDS, then down-graded that to hypermobility, then scrapped the whole thing when it didn’t stick and went for Marfan, brittle bone syndrome, something indescribably long and by that point Peter had lost count of what he may or may not have had wrong with him.</p>
<p>He was fucked, and, though he didn’t know it then, it was the fault of a dead spider and nothing else.</p>
<p>He kept sticking to things. He kept breaking shit. His senses continued to fluctuate between the human capacity for stimulus absorption and what had, at the time, felt like the entire world was trying to cram itself into his brain all at once.</p>
<p>His blood was a boiling, writhing, acrid thing in his veins. It was hot in the way that dry ice left burns on the hands of pre-adolescents during fireworks displays at Fourth of July parties.</p>
<p>It shrieked through his body and eroded his heart because it was radioactive and fatally toxic but somehow he was alive and unaffected.</p>
<p>It hurt like nothing should ever hurt--like leukemia or chemo or the gnawing terror of a positive HIV diagnosis. Pervasive, or prevalent, or inescapable, or all of it.</p>
<p>It was insidious and it was invasive, but it was his blood to have and his to create, his to replenish from his irradiated bone marrow and so he guarded it as well as he could.</p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p>Ben had been the one to suggest the going out. Ben had been the one to connect the dots between the experimentation at the lab to which Peter had taken a field trip and the painful, swollen bite bug he’d come home with. Ben was the one behind the spider gimmick and he designed the first pass at the web-shooters.</p>
<p>So Peter went out into the world. He started at night, face covered by the hood of a backwards sweatshirt-hoodie and wearing goggles with his prescription in the lenses. He’d been training at the gym with Ben on cardio: climbing, rope work, swimming, running. No weights; he’d only crush the bar or break expensive machines.</p>
<p>The web-shooters were a bit of a mess. Finding anchors for them proved difficult and the trigger was too low on his wrist for easy depression. The web formula wasn’t stretchy enough, so it was hard to maintain momentum without snapping the line. </p>
<p>They’d workshopped those things together, Ben and Peter. Had spent hours and many tired nights drafting and tweaking, had skipped evening events at temple, social appearances at work parties and extracurricular activities. May took to calling them her lab rats because they tended to hole up in the back bedroom for extended lengths of time, emerging grimy and greasy and full of excitement which twinkled in their eyes.</p>
<p>And soon they’d gotten them fine-tuned enough that Peter’d felt confident in his ability to tweak them as needed without his uncle’s help. So he was off and on his own and it was good.</p>
<p>It was good and Peter was getting better at control and self-preservation and then Ben started looking into the research institute and the exhibition from which they’d collectively decided the spider bite had originated.</p>
<p>It was called Oscorp.</p>
<p>Oscorp found out about Ben’s prodding and they saw his fingers working to pry at the shit they’d been trying to bury and they killed him for it. With a bullet.</p>
<p>Peter had been forced to grow up and straighten his back against the blows and become an adult. Aunt May had been there for him, but she’d had her own massive boulder to roll up the hill and Peter would never have forgiven himself for adding to that load.</p>
<p>They’d managed. He did what he thought Ben would want him to do. He got through high school and then college and juggled a few jobs until he earned enough to keep a roof over his head and also over his aunt’s when she retired.</p>
<p>He became Spider-Man and Spider-Man became him--they chafed against each other in his broken-down psyche. He was every version of himself, glued together by gutter shit and greasy fast-food fingers, all multiplying and stuck inside a body that thought it might be better off if it was a spider.</p>
<p>He wasn’t a spider. He was a person. Life had dealt him a shit hand. He learned that at fourteen.</p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p>But now Peter was years removed from his first reckless, desperate, angst-fueled leap into the suit. </p>
<p>Eons. </p>
<p>He was old now, and he felt it. He’d long since learned how to manage his strength and his stickiness. He’d mastered spatial awareness in order to keep his joints in working condition. Had made himself into a Person and into a Routine, a Blank Slate and an Art Gallery. Had discovered how to keep an identity separate from an ideology. </p>
<p>He grew up when he was a teenager and then promptly forgot what it meant to feel unburdened by his guilty conscience.</p>
<p>He was exhausted. He had experienced enough to fill a million lifetimes and then some. His reflection in the mirror no longer bothered to make eye contact. He hurt.</p>
<p>He hurt so much.</p>
<p>Wouldn’t wish it on his worst enemy. Which, in retrospect, was often himself. </p>
<p>Figures.</p>
<p>These were some of the things tugging at the back of his mind as he stared into the terrified eyes of a middle schooler who’d backed himself against the ladder of some scaffolding and assumed the ultimate defensive position: knees tucked in front of his chest, hands clawed around his calves.</p>
<p>Peter felt it in that moment; this kid was like him. This kid was suffering and confused and wholly petrified with fear about what was happening to him. This kid had a sixth sense like his own, and it seemed to awaken something in their minds which Peter had never felt before.</p>
<p>It was a first in a world made up of nothing new or exciting or surprising.</p>
<p>Peter whispered, “You’re like me.”</p>
<p>The kid shivered so hard that goosebumps broke out on his arms and legs.</p>
<p>The redolent sounds of Doc Ock’s mechanized tentacles approaching broke the tense silence. Peter glanced at the doorway, then back at the kid, whose goosebumps had faded. </p>
<p>“Be careful. Stay out of the way. I’ll come find you after this.”</p>
<p>With that, he stood up against the better judgment of his aching knees, strolled to the open doorway, and hollered, “Ock, you’re runnin’ late for our dinner date! I’ve been waiting so long!”</p>
<p>A tentacle shot out from the blind corner at the near end of the hallway and Peter booked it out of the room, latched onto the ceiling about thirty feet away. “C’mon man, that was some weak sauce!”</p>
<p>A frustrated growl sounded out from around the corner, then Ock’s ugly mug finally caught up with his wayward tentacle.</p>
<p>Peter narrowed his eyes and waited.</p>
<p>Ock stalked closer: a predator gearing up to strike. Peter sat back on his haunches, upside down.</p>
<p>Just a few more feet.</p>
<p>Aaaand, boom. Ock passed the doorway behind which the kid was cowering. </p>
<p>Peter got a move on. Gave Ock a nice run-around in the building they were trashing, then headed for the sky.</p>
<p>Ock took the bait. </p>
<p>The kid was safe.</p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p>Peter came down from the ledge on which he was watching a pair of patrolling cops struggle to get Doc Ock into their cruiser. He went to find the kid.</p>
<p>Kid hadn’t moved. </p>
<p>Oh, he was so little. He was younger than Peter’d been by <em>years</em>.</p>
<p>Peter slid next to him on the scaffolding.</p>
<p>The kid’s eyes widened and tracked his movements.</p>
<p>Peter swung a leg up and rested his scraped-up left arm on a knee. “You got a name?”</p>
<p>A hand came unclasped from its calf. “Not one you need to know,” the kid rasped. His voice was ragged, like he’d been crying. Peter traced the web design on his forearm and avoided eye contact.</p>
<p>“Okay, then I’mma just call you ‘Kid’. Deal?”</p>
<p>A microscopic nod.</p>
<p>“Cool. How’d you end up here, Kid?”</p>
<p>“I, uh. Got stuck to my jeans. Went in the front entrance for some privacy to try to get unstuck. Felt all panicked and tingly, then you and the guy with all the tubes showed up.” Kid tugged at the other hand, which was still gripping his pants. Upon closer inspection, it was apparent that the palm of his hand couldn’t or wouldn’t remove itself.</p>
<p>Peter chuckled. “Oh, I know how that feels. This ever happen before?”</p>
<p>Kid’s shoulders loosened and his neck brought his head further out of its knee fortress. He croaked, “Yeah. I tore up one of my sketchpads trying to let go of it.”</p>
<p>Aw, Kid did art. Peter let his leg slide to the ground in front of him. He felt that Thing shift again, right at the seam of his hairline where it met the base of his skull. The kid inhaled like he could feel it too.</p>
<p>He made a decision. He thought Ben would have made the same one. “I’m Peter. I think I can help you.” He turned his head to look Kid right in those wide, deep eyes.</p>
<p>Innocent eyes. Soulful. Scared.</p>
<p>“Miles.”</p>
<p>“Sorry?”</p>
<p>Kid gestured with his free hand. “Miles. That’s my name.”</p>
<p>Peter nodded. He closed his eyes inside the mask and tilted his head back to lean against the piece of scaffolding support behind him. “That’s a good name.”</p>
<p>“Yeah. S’okay.”</p>
<p>Peter was tired. Too tired to argue semantics. Too tired. “How ‘bout we see if we can’t get you unstuck and then head home?” he asked the backs of his eyelids.</p>
<p>The kid hummed in affirmation and the Thing woke up in appreciation for that noise.</p>
<p>God, it was like the Spidey Sense had made a kid.</p>
<p>Or maybe the kid had made a Spidey Sense.</p>
<p>Peter opened his eyes and scooched over to better help Miles disentangle his hand.</p>
<p>He took Miles home after. Lived in Brooklyn. </p>
<p>He gave the kid his number and threatened him on pain of webbed punishment not to share it with anyone else.</p>
<p>Those big ol’ eyes were so earnest. It made Peter a little scared about what he was getting himself into.</p>
<p>But then he remembered how alone he’d been and for how many years he’d thought it would be like that forever. He bucked the fuck up and steeled himself against too many bad memories and promised himself it’d be better for this kid.</p>
<p>It had to be. He’d make it better. Because being Spider-Man hurt in impossible ways and it wasn’t something to shoulder alone and Peter had proven that point to himself time and time again.</p>
<p>He went home. Nursed his wounds and went to bed, which was so very empty of MJ.</p>
<p>He had a text the next morning from an unknown number. It was fifteen minutes old and it read: ‘got stuck to laundry hamper, kind of panicking bc late for school sos’</p>
<p>Peter groaned and pulled his achy hips upright. He made coffee, then headed over to Miles’s place with a mug in hand.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. cracking open</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>:) this is i guess a multi chaptered work now lol. heed the tags and stay oh so very safe and i love you</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <i>And now I found brimstone in my garden, I found roses set on fire. And I found Jesus, what a liar - Little Pistol; Mother Mother.</i>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p>Peter kept up with Miles over the course of the next month or so, but shit hit the fan in terms of his finances before he really got the chance to arrange a meeting with the kid and he’d been hard-pressed for a minute of free time during which to show someone how to be less sticky.</p>
<p>Miles didn’t mind. He was patient about it.</p>
<p>But ho, boy, could those sticky little fingers text.</p>
<p>A lot.</p>
<p>Every time something strange, exciting, confusing happened to him, he’d shoot off about a hundred consecutive question marks and a load of indecipherable youthful gibberish to be delivered to Peter’s long-suffering phone for the express purpose of driving him fucking crazy.</p>
<p>The phone went on do not disturb mode during work hours now. If only for the sake of the couple of his coworkers who were unlucky enough to sit adjacent to his shitshow of a desk.</p>
<p>He was pretty sure the one who sat to his left was planning his imminent demise. He couldn’t blame her. The phone and the paper mountain and the inability to keep track of a pen for more than 48 hours would drive him up the wall too.</p>
<p>May had tried to teach him in his teenage years how to be at least an iota more organized than her husband had been. The present state of Peter’s desktop (and the inundated surfaces of his kitchen counters at home, now that he was thinking about it) were indicative of one of her only failures in life. </p>
<p>There had never been very much hope, no matter how hard she’d tried; Peter really liked to nest. He liked to have stuff and clutter and kitsch all around him to satisfy his need to have a lot of sensory input. He could shuffle, fidget, scribble on, organize and un-organize all that mess and it made something mean and loud and staticky inside his head shut the fuck up for just a little while. The mess stayed. Also the unreasonable number of candles, incense sticks, car air fresheners scattered precariously on the corners of surfaces throughout his house. Those too. Good smells.</p>
<p>The phone was on do not disturb for a doubly good reason today: Peter had an interview with an art columnist for a rival paper about one of his most recent photo series. Couldn’t have Miles screaming at him via emoji-laden paragraphs of text about static electricity shocks and feet being glued to socks inside of shoes while he was trying to schmooze some twenty-something in an overlarge beanie and a pair of jeans that fit like a garbage bag.</p>
<p>Speak of the devil. Peter glanced up for a brief moment and caught sight of a pair of chunky ass combat boots stomping their merry way over to his corner of the office unit. He looked back at his monitor as the boots scraped a visitor’s chair shrilly over from the near wall and deposited it on the floor across the vast mound of papers on his desk.</p>
<p>Peter lifted his world-weary eyes from his computer screen and raised a questioning eyebrow at the bright pink punk-rock mohawk attached to the hand that was extended in an offer for a shake.</p>
<p>His life, in that instant, felt unbearably dull. Peter flexed his arthritic, keyboard-tapping hands and felt a couple of the knuckles pop. He stood and accepted the proffered hand. He could feel his hair feeling self conscious about itself.</p>
<p>The mohawk atop the lady’s head swayed to the rhythm of the handshake. Peter forced himself to look down and make eye contact and smile. Her pierced visage beamed at him warmly and she released her grip. </p>
<p>They sat. </p>
<p>The woman started her introduction. She had a good voice. Peter was jealous of her skirt. She was very nice.</p>
<p>First couple of questions went well. </p>
<p>Then the email tab open on his computer refreshed itself and a torrent of emails from an address he’d never seen before came flooding in.</p>
<p>The address read, “mmoraleslikesart@gmail.com”, which was so incredibly middle school of Miles that it made Peter’s teeth ache. Some of the subject lines were absolutely unintelligible keysmashes. Others read, “Need your help please sir”, “Oh please please please look at your email”, “why arent u answering ur phone help”, “it’s an emergency i need help pls help me”.</p>
<p>Peter opened that last one and skimmed the panicked, typo-ridden text for a location. He found it hidden in the last line and shoved off from his desk, sending some of the paper mess spilling into Ms. Mohawk’s lap.</p>
<p>Didn’t apologize. No time. He grabbed his phone and his bookbag and sprinted out of the office unit towards the stairwell exit. </p>
<p>Kid was in trouble.</p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p>Miles’s dad was a cop, Peter came to learn. He met him through the lenses of the suit when he skidded to a stop in the plaza in front of the building that Miles had mentioned. The cop was very, very panicked and calling out his kid’s name in a watery plea. There were several other cops there with their cars, and a throng of people that parted for Peter when he approached and ducked under the police barrier.</p>
<p>The dad being a cop was a problem. There was no hiding Miles’s enhancements from his parents. They were too unpredictable, too invasive and too debilitating. And very, very obvious.</p>
<p>Peter knew this from experience. Getting bitten was a curse disguised as a blessing. </p>
<p>It ruined his body and then healed it beyond belief, left him simultaneously disabled and inhumanly strong. </p>
<p>He’d been able to hide it from his folks for all of a week. Frankly, he was surprised Miles had gotten away with it for this long.</p>
<p>The jig was so very up.</p>
<p>Miles was a tiny dot attached to one of the windows on the highest floor of the building. This would be less of a problem if the aforementioned building was not about seventy stories tall. And the Rockefeller Center.</p>
<p>And if the wind were not blowing the hardest it’d been all month.</p>
<p>Officer Dad caught sight of Peter and his eyes went wide as dinner plates. He extricated himself from his megaphone and from someone who Peter assumed was his wife, decked out in scrubs and clinging to his arm. Peter strode towards him to close the gap.</p>
<p>An emergency helicopter shrieked overhead.</p>
<p>Officer Dad had tears coursing down his cheeks and his eyes were puffy from crying and it broke Peter’s fucking heart.</p>
<p>Dad pulled himself together and shook the terror out of his shoulders to address him. He spoke, a little shaky: “That’s my baby up there, sir. He’s stuck. I know it’s only a matter of time before he falls. I’m scared, man.”</p>
<p>Peter risked a glance up. He could barely make out Miles’s green sweatshirt from this far down.</p>
<p>“How has he been talking to you?”</p>
<p>Officer Dad held up his phone. The display indicated that he was in a call with Miles. Peter could hear wind rushing by and panicked breathing from the other end of the line. </p>
<p>Must have been how Miles had been able to email him. Must have gotten stuck--why at the top of the Rockefeller, Peter couldn’t elucidate--and called his folks and then tried to contact Peter.</p>
<p>Peter put his hands on his hips and squinted up at the kid. When he tilted his head, he could make out the bottoms of sneakers braced desperately against the glass, one arm glued to the pane from elbow to palm and the other brought up against his head.</p>
<p>“Can I talk to him for a sec?”</p>
<p>Officer Dad--J. Davis, the nametag on his chest read--passed the phone over.</p>
<p>The rushing wind shrieked across the line when he put the speaker to his ear. Miles hiccuped a sob.</p>
<p>“Kid, it’s Peter. Can you look down?” he asked, raising his volume to be heard over the breeze.</p>
<p>Miles took a deep, shuddering breath and responded, “Uh huh, I see you.”</p>
<p>Peter waved in big, sweeping strokes over his head so Miles could see it. He earned a soft chuckle for his efforts. </p>
<p>“Your arm stuck?”</p>
<p>“Uh huh. ‘M scared.”</p>
<p>“I know, bud. I’m gonna come getcha, but we’re gonna have to be real careful gettin’ you down, ‘kay?”</p>
<p>The wind picked up across the line and Miles cried out. Peter watched his tiny form sway precariously. Officer Dad Davis clutched his face and muttered a prayer under his breath.</p>
<p>“Please help me,” Miles choked out once the gust subsided.</p>
<p>That <i>voice</i>. Oh jesus, this kid. What cruel fucking god thought it would be okay to put that little boy through this? He didn’t deserve such a shit hand. Especially not so young.</p>
<p>“‘M comin’ up. Keep sticking.”</p>
<p>Peter passed the phone back to Dad and nudged his way through the group of officers lined up at the base of the tower. He turned around to find a hold for some web across the street and shot a line out to connect with a railing on a balcony about fifteen stories up. Once he was airborne, he leveraged his momentum to swing himself way up. Made it to Miles in thirty or so seconds.</p>
<p>He stuck to the wall on the side that Miles was facing and mirrored his position.</p>
<p>It was cold up here. Miles’s bare forearm had goosebumps running along its length and it shivered against the window. His sleeves were bunched up around the bend of his elbows. His teeth chattered when a gust drifted by.</p>
<p>The helicopter was still circling the building. It kicked up a frigid breeze every time it got close. Seemed like it was trying to find a safe place to land.</p>
<p>Peter pulled his mask up over the bridge of his nose, keenly aware of the massive audience below them and the people undoubtedly watching the proceedings from inside. “Alright, how’d you get yourself into this mess?”</p>
<p>Miles’s spooked gaze focused on Peter’s mouth. “W-we were on a f-fieldtrip. Up top--” he indicated with his chin and shivered hard “--n’ one a’ the kids f-from an elementary school group figured out how to get through the barricades without being noticed.”</p>
<p>Peter nodded, humming in understanding. He got to work getting into a good position to hold Miles’s weight while he tried to unstick. “So you went after the kid?”</p>
<p>Miles nodded. He relaxed his tense back into Peter’s torso when he felt the support beneath and behind him. Peter asked him to pocket his phone to free up his hand. “I gotter before she got over the edge, but th’wind knocked me off,” he continued.</p>
<p>“Mmm. Where’s your class now? Go ahead and try to let go. Start at the elbow.”</p>
<p>Miles took a couple of deep breaths and used his free hand to pry at his forearm. He grunted, “Everyone’s at the bottom,” while he worked. Something shifted when the point of his elbow pulled free and he whimpered in pain.</p>
<p>Peter tossed out a web across the side of Miles that was facing away from the building to help stabilize himself and to serve as a sort of railing.</p>
<p>After a couple of slow minutes, Miles scrabbled at his arm, frustrated with the poor progress. Peter swatted at his hand and admonished him: “Be patient with it. Takes time to learn to control it.”</p>
<p>The kid grumbled like the tween he was, but slowed regardless. He was crying silent tears.</p>
<p>Peter wracked his brain for funny shit to talk about and landed on the mohawk he’d been introduced to that morning. He fabricated an intricate tale of a woman with a foot-tall hair spike and a long, flowing maxi-skirt. He gave her cosmetic brass knuckles and a leather jacket with shoulder studs and increased the height of her platforms by about ten inches.</p>
<p>By the end of it, Miles was giggling at the absurd image he’d concocted and everything except the pads of his fingers had come disconnected from the window. Peter increased the tension on the web keeping them upright and shifted his feet closer under him. </p>
<p>“You about ready to get down from here?”</p>
<p>Miles nodded emphatically. His pinky came free in the process. </p>
<p>Peter looped his free hand under Miles’s shoulder, across his chest, and said, “Ready whenever you are. Just count down for me.”</p>
<p>“Three…”</p>
<p>One finger.</p>
<p>“Two…”</p>
<p>The thumb. Peter slipped his mask back over his mouth.</p>
<p>One. Miles let go and fell back into him.</p>
<p>Peter threw out a line to a pole supporting the barricades on the top of the Rock and severed the line holding them upright.</p>
<p>The kid squealed the whole way down.</p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p>The parents were the scariest part of the day for him. </p>
<p>He wasn’t good with parents.</p>
<p>Dad all dressed up in the cop getup, he could tangle with. He could posture at that. Dad in a white tee and faded jeans, sat behind a cooling mug of coffee and staring into it like the world was imploding before his baggy, inflamed eyes?</p>
<p>And the mom? Oho. </p>
<p>So much worse. </p>
<p>She’d turned cold and bitter. Permafrost. Brow set in a furious stand off against the ceiling. </p>
<p>Peter swallowed and felt his adam’s apple bob in his throat.</p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p>Miles had been retrieved safely from the skyscraper and promptly escorted to the nearest ambulance as soon as his feet had touched solid ground.</p>
<p>He’d been shell-shocked at first. Then hysterical with pain. His elbow had come dislocated when he caught himself after he fell and they had to take him to the ER to put it back in because of the swelling. </p>
<p>Peter caught a glimpse of him before the ambulance doors closed. All wrapped up in a shock blanket and attached to some concoction of IV fluids and probably a strong sedative. </p>
<p>He was tiny.</p>
<p>Mom and dad were in there too, holding each other and staying out of the way of the paramedics. Dad’s head turned and he made eye contact with Peter and then the doors shut.</p>
<p>Peter changed out of the suit and took the subway over to the hospital. He asked after Miles at the ER desk and was instructed in so many words to pull up a chair in the waiting room and sit his entitled ass down like everyone else had to do. The receptionist was maybe not having the best day.</p>
<p>They let him back after Miles’s folks okayed it. Kid was passed out, tangled up in a mess of hospital blankets and a sling for his arm. He was, in all likelihood, going to be discharged once he woke up. He looked peaceful.</p>
<p>His parents did not. They looked up when Peter cleared his throat.</p>
<p>Officer Dad raised an inquiring eyebrow and asked, “You gon’ tell us what’s going on with our baby?”</p>
<p>Peter rubbed his neck and avoided eye contact. He didn’t respond with words; instead, he pulled his bookbag from the shoulder it was slung across, unzipped a pocket, and produced the mask. He handed it to Dad. </p>
<p>Mom leveled her gaze at him and it made all the metal pins, screws, bullets, shrapnel floating around in his body vibrate with anxiety.</p>
<p>They took Miles home and told Peter to come over in an hour or so. Dad kept the mask clenched in his hand as they got Miles settled in the car. He took the thing with him. </p>
<p>Peter took a cab and spent the ride there scrolling mindlessly down his Instagram timeline and listening to the rush-hour chorus of horns sounding off around him.</p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p>Miles had been asleep when he got there, curled up on the couch under a plush blanket. A half-eaten bowl of soup and a sprite can with a straw stuck through the hole in the tab sat on the coffee table. Mom invited him in and sat him at the breakfast table. She made coffee. Didn’t ask whether or not he wanted some, just poured three steaming mugs and set them down next to a bottle of creamer and some sugar packets.</p>
<p>Peter sipped; it was strong. Rich. Good stuff. He cradled it and let it warm his aching hands.</p>
<p>Dad got up from a chair in the living room and lumbered over to sit at the table across from him. He set the mask next to the creamer and poured a couple of sugars into his coffee. Mom turned the light off in the kitchen and pulled up a chair. They seemed about his age.</p>
<p>Dad’s eyes welled up. “You’re Spider-Man,” he said.</p>
<p>“Yes.”</p>
<p>“You know Miles.”</p>
<p>“Yes. We met a few weeks ago. I gave him my number in case of an emergency.”</p>
<p>Mom blew on her coffee and asked, “What’s your name?” in some sort of Spanish accent.</p>
<p>“Peter,” he responded, throat tight against the words.</p>
<p>Mom introduced herself as Rio and her husband as Jeff.</p>
<p>Peter risked a glance at Officer Jeff Davis and caught him working his jaw. They made eye contact. Peter raised an eyebrow and said, “If you want to take me in, go ham. But it wouldn’t be in your best interest--Miles is deep in this now.”</p>
<p>Rio knitted her brow in reaction to that. She asked, “What does that mean?”</p>
<p>Okay. Guess story time was happening sooner rather than later. Peter dove in.</p>
<p>Started with the first time he’d stuck to something. Worked his way through the years of accidents, trauma, terror, loss. He pulled up his sleeve to show them the knotted scar encircling the elbow he’d torn apart. Told them about the enhanced senses and the extra Sense, the sticky appendages, superhuman strength. Went down the whole, exhaustive list. He warned them of the unpredictable, volatile fluctuations in these powers. He answered their questions, let them inquire about old injuries, showcased a couple of the really impressive things he could do.</p>
<p>Jeff was pretty quiet throughout the affair. Rio was the primary driver of the Q&amp;A session. Peter spent most of it waiting for the big questions. The How Does Miles Figure Into This, the Why Him, Why Us, What Did We Do To Deserve This.</p>
<p>Dad ended up being the one to ask the how in a voice that sat, shaking, on the razor’s edge of a whisper.</p>
<p>Peter broke it to them like he was ripping a bandage off a wound that had dried bloody and gotten stuck to the fibers. Quick, sharp, painful. “Miles is like me.”</p>
<p>And then came the why. <i>Why</i> did the two of them have these powers? What caused it? The how from the last question echoed in the new one’s footsteps--how could this have happened to Miles? Peter untucked his shirt and, a bit self-conscious, lifted it to bare his scarred left side. Resting over his lowest rib, he knew, sat the pockmarked and fading scar from the spider bite. It wasn’t large, but it branched out from the two puncture marks within the central mass in fractal patterns and raced up a few of the veins along his torso and back. A lot of these branches were layered over with newer scars from the past couple of decades of fighting. Rio covered her mouth; in fear, pity, sympathy, disgust, Peter couldn’t tell. “Irradiated spider bite. From an experiment gone wrong in a lab at Oscorp.”</p>
<p>“And Miles--he was bitten too?” Mom asked through her hand.</p>
<p>He nodded. Rio turned to gaze at the back of the couch on which Miles was sleeping. </p>
<p>Jeff leaned his elbows on the table. </p>
<p>They were grieving. For the life their son had lost. For the one he was being forced to step into. For his body and mind and spirit and soul. </p>
<p>“What do we do?” emerged from Jeff’s lips and came to rest on the tabletop. Pooled like lead.</p>
<p>“Oh, man. That’s the million dollar question I’ve never been able to answer, isn’t it? Barring all the ‘why me’s and the ‘what did I do wrong’s, it’s always the hardest thing to answer. I wanna try to help you all, I think. So that we can maybe get farther than I managed to do on my own. God knows I could’ve used some guidance back when I was starting out. Someone who got it, who’d been through it too.”</p>
<p>“So what can we do? As parents?”</p>
<p>Peter turned to look at the back of the couch like Rio. What could the parents do? He hadn’t ever really thought critically about it. </p>
<p>But there was someone who had. And she’d be over the goddamn moon when she met Miles. And Peter owed her a visit anyway.</p>
<p>“Actually, I think my aunt might be better equipped to answer that. She’s been in y’all’s shoes. Still is.”</p>
<p>Mom and Dad made miserable eye contact with one another and held shaking hands across the table. Miles snuffled in his sleep.</p>
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